Month: July 2009

With tougher economic times, getting an interview for a Sales Engineer position is becoming more scarce, so to make sure you are multi-threaded, consider the following suggestions to make the most our of your opportunity.

All good Sales Engineers know their YTD attainment for the sales team they were supporting as well as their revenue influence or revenue assisted metrics…Ensure you know where you stack rank vs your colleagues…Also, ensure that you have a collection of top 3 deals that you worked on that you can leverage to answer common questions around thinking outside of the box, biggest competitive win, going above and beyond to getting a deal done etc..etc..etc..

You also need to have some situational examples of deals you have won by using non-conventional methods, for example: setting up wired up, establishing a trust advisor role to gain access to the selection committee criteria etc..etc… Most SE just demo, but the SE who thinks outside the box improves their conversion ratio by setting up an effective plan of attack prior to demoing…Good luck on prepping for your interview…

Manufacturing operations have it right. If you don’t build quality into a product, people won’t buy it. Toward this end, manufacturing divisions boast of compliance with ISO 900x quality standards and six-sigma quality initiatives. The improvements in operational quality have direct and measured impact on the bottom line.

So why don’t sales operations have the same mindset? Just as improving the quality of calorie burning activities will lose weight, just as improving the quality of manufacturing operations drives product excellence and revenue, improving the quality of sales operations will have direct and measured revenue impact.

Very few organizations annually budget for quality initiatives specific to their sales operations, many are the same folks who implement ISO 900x and six-sigma in their manufacturing operation. You have to wonder why not. Pehaps because the sales trade has been a black art for so long, few executives believe that structured quality initiatives could possibly apply.

But oh they do. A handful of companies are experimenting with implementing lean six sigma type initiatives into their sales operations with dramatic results. Simple changes in simple sales activities, activities that have long been neglected for quality improvement, go a long way. Simple regular measurement of the quality of key sales activities goes a long way. Payback of 50-300x on the dollar are common.

It may take a long time to change the C-level mindset with regard to regularly budgeting for sales operations quality. But in the meantime, please help us beat the drum.

If you want to know what a company sells, ask to see their comp plan. If your sales managers are compensated to sell a product/service that the one they are selling can’t be sold under, guess what? Thats right! It fails. This is the primary reason for companies not being able to move their wares.

But not just any comp plan will do. And that is the rub.

Companies today are in a financial bind. They need to spend less and save more. Do more with what they have, and all that. But how do you do this with a strategic product? You know, strategic, one of dozens of words and phrases we throw about as if we know what they mean, and assuming that they mean the same thing to everyone. Wrong.

Continue reading “We Are What We Sell… Aren’t We?”

It used to be, years back, that a certification meant that you were knowledgeable. Problem was, it really only meant that you were able to pass the kind of test given, and that you had enough short term memory to cram for the test’s material. Certifications do not now, nor have they ever, indicated wisdom or knowledge in the application of one technology into the infinite variety of prospect environments.

If anything, these days too many certifications mean that the person has no time for a real job in the real world, and is virtually useless in a Sales Engineering situation. With thousands of certifications for thousands of applications, which ones do you pick? Oh yeah, and there are more every day! Would you bring a perpetual student on the most important sales call of your career? Of course not. Continue reading “Certifications and Sales Engineering”